Watch as we send bitcoin from Miami to a Ukrainian in Poland

Alena Vorobiova hadn’t thought much about bitcoin before Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Fast forward to border closures and shelling on her hometown, cash shortages at ATMs across the country, and the central bank suspending electronic cash transfers — and she decided to give bitcoin a try.

Whereas money providers often charge transfer fees of 10% or more when you send $100 from the U.S. to Ukraine, bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which is a payments platform built on bitcoin’s base layer, slashes the cost of transactions to virtually zero.

Vorobiova and CNBC decided to put Lightning payments to the test — with the expertise and translation skills of bitcoin developer Gleb Naumenko, who is currently hiding out in the western part of Ukraine as the war rages on.

The bottom line? It really does work as well as bitcoin boosters say it does.

The process of downloading a crypto wallet onto Vorobiova’s phone, transferring bitcoin over the Lightning Network from the U.S. to Poland, and withdrawing the equivalent in Polish currency from a bitcoin ATM from the southwest city of Wrocław took less than three minutes.

Last August on a road trip from Houston to Dallas, Peter McCormack — founder and host of the popular What Bitcoin Did’ podcast — taught CNBC how to use the Lightning Network to make instant payments to anyone in the world.

The tutorial took less than 60 seconds and involved four basic steps: We downloaded the Blue Wallet app and generated a one-time invoice in the form of a QR code. McCormack scanned that QR code using a similar app on his own phone, and then transferred 100,000 satoshis, or sats (the smallest denomination of bitcoin, about 0.00000001 BTC) from his account to ours. The total transfer was equivalent to about $50.

Eight months later, from a hotel room in Miami on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference, CNBC decided to pay that knowledge — and some of those sats — forward.

On a three-way video call with Naumenko in Western Ukraine, Vorobiova in Southwest Poland, and CNBC in Miami, we followed a very similar sequence of events.

With the guidance of Naumenko, Vorobiova downloaded the Muun wallet app, a different type of self-custodial wallet for bitcoin and Lightning, made a four-digit pin, and generated an invoice as a QR code. CNBC then captured that QR code using the scan mode in the Blue Wallet and transferred over 50,000 of sats from McCormack. The fees amounted to fractions of a penny. (For purposes of the experiment, Naumenko transferred another 50,000 because the bitcoin ATM had a minimum withdrawal amount.)

Bitcoin developer Jeff Czyz tells CNBC that Lightning wallets are compatible because they all have to implement the Basis of Lightning Technology, or BOLT, specification, which defines a layer-2 protocol for sending payments across the Lightning Network.

“A Lightning wallet app is akin to a bank,…